FlashAustria

Thunderstorm Occurrence in Austria 2010–2018

Description

Thunderstorm occurrence on 32 x 32 sq-km grid over Austria, Europe, for the years 2010–2018 and the month May–August, derived by the ground-based Austrian Lightning Detection and Information System (ALDIS). A selection of atmospheric parameters from the fifth ECMWF re-analysis (ERA5) interpolated nearest neighbour method to the grid of the counted lightning discharges. The temporal resolution of the data is hourly.

Usage

data("ThunderstormAustria", package = "FlashAustria")

Format

Two objects ThunderstormAustriaTrain and ThunderstormAustriaEval are added to the environment, both of which are data.frames.

tunderstorm: factor indicating the occurrence of a tunderstorm.
d2m: 2m dewpoint temperature.
q_prof_PC1: First principal component of the vertical profile of specific humidity.
cswc_prof_PC4: Fourth principal component of the vertical profile of specific snow water content.
t_prof_PC1: First principal component of the vertical profile of temperature.
v_prof_PC2: Second principal component of the vertical profile of v component of wind.
sqrt_cape: Square root of convective available potential energy.
sqrt_lsp: Square root of large scale precipitation.

Details

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines a thunderstorm as follows: “One or more sudden electrical discharges, manifested by a flash of light (lightning) or rumbling sound (thunder).”

Following this definition the thunderstorm occurrence is derived from the ALDIS lightning detection data: If at least one lightning discharge was detected in a 32 x 32 sq-km grid, it indicates the occurrence of a thunderstorm. Only a random subset of the data given, thunderstorm occurrence is provided for training and evaluation: ThunderstormAustriaTrain and ThunderstormAustriaEval contain 40000 and 20000 observations, respectively.

References

To cite the flash count data (observations), please use:

Schulz W, Cummins K, Diendorfer G, Dorninger M (2005). Cloud-to-Ground Lightning in Austria: A 10-Year Study Using Data from a Lightning Location System. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 110(D9), D09101. doi:10.1029/2004JD005332

Schulz W, Diendorfer G, Pedeboy S, Poelman DR (2016). The European Lightning Location System EUCLID – Part 1: Performance Analysis and Validation. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 16(2), 595–605. doi:10.5194/nhess-16-595-2016

To cite the reanalyses data (covariates), please use:

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (2017). ERA5: Fifth Generation of ECMWF Atmospheric Reanalyses of the Global Climate. Copernicus Climate Change Service Climate Data Store (CDS), date of access: June 2019. https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home

The WMO’s definition of thunderstorm:

https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/thunderstorm.html

Examples

library("FlashAustria")

data("ThunderstormAustria", package = "FlashAustria")
head(ThunderstormAustriaTrain)

  thunderstorm      d2m   q_prof_PC1 cswc_prof_PC4  t_prof_PC1 v_prof_PC2
1           no 290.0202 -0.009587860 -3.211979e-06  20.6717355  10.370008
2           no 288.2035 -0.004992495  1.842572e-05   1.2031507  -6.316458
3          yes 282.0027 -0.001851508 -9.525404e-07  10.3826333   2.884094
4           no 281.5736  0.003735816 -3.208647e-06 -20.0231977 -24.197912
5           no 287.6913 -0.004767895  6.655500e-05   5.9382654  -1.768395
6           no 283.6708  0.001762852 -3.226052e-06   0.9361294  -2.554429
  sqrt_cape     sqrt_lsp
1 31.080705 0.0000000000
2 10.607233 0.0164166356
3  1.515197 0.0022739445
4  5.190945 0.0006608171
5 21.650316 0.0038975797
6  3.467836 0.0000000000

nrow(ThunderstormAustriaTrain)

[1] 40000

nrow(ThunderstormAustriaEval)

[1] 20000

prop.table(table(ThunderstormAustriaTrain$thunderstorm))


   yes     no 
0.0337 0.9663

plot(thunderstorm ~ log(sqrt_cape), ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1,
  breaks = 0:17/4)

plot(thunderstorm ~ d2m, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1)

plot(thunderstorm ~ q_prof_PC1, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1)

plot(thunderstorm ~ cswc_prof_PC4, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1,
  breaks = c(-Inf, -4, -3.3, -3.2, -3, -2, 0, 10, Inf) / 1e6)

plot(thunderstorm ~ t_prof_PC1, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1)

plot(thunderstorm ~ v_prof_PC2, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1)

plot(thunderstorm ~ sqrt_lsp, ThunderstormAustriaTrain, ylevels = 2:1,
  breaks = c(0, 0.0001, 0.002, 0.005, 0.008, 0.012, 0.015, 0.02, 0.05))